Chad Grunander, a prosecutor in Utah, was at a legal conference last September when his phone lit up with an urgent text from his 18-year-old daughter: “CHARLIE GOT SHOT.”
That frantic family moment has now become the focus of a legal battle over whether the presence of a prosecutor’s child at the Utah college event where the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot should disqualify the entire prosecution team from the case. Mr. Grunander is a leading member of the prosecution team pursuing the death penalty against Tyler J. Robinson, the 22-year-old charged with killing Mr. Kirk on Sept. 10 as he hosted an open-air debate at Utah Valley University in Orem.
Defense lawyers argue that Mr. Grunander and his colleagues in the Utah County attorney’s office have a disqualifying conflict of interest, and they have asked Judge Tony Graf to remove all of the county’s prosecutors from the case. If that happens, the case is likely to be taken over by another county prosecutor or by the Utah attorney general’s office.
In an hourslong hearing in Utah’s Fourth District Court on Tuesday, Mr. Grunander and his boss, County Attorney Jeffrey S. Gray, took on the unlikely role of witnesses, climbing onto the stand to answer questions about how they had handled the potential conflict of interest and how the prosecution had decided to seek the death penalty.
“I do not believe there’s any conflict whatsoever,” Mr. Gray testified. “I made that conclusion. I stand by it.”
Their testimony offered an extraordinary glimpse into the inner workings of a county prosecutor’s office thrust into the national spotlight by Mr. Kirk’s killing.
Judge Graf is expected to make a written ruling later this month.
Prosecutors argued that the mere presence of Mr. Grunander’s daughter in the crowd of 3,000 people at Mr. Kirk’s rally did not create a conflict of interest. They said his daughter had not actually seen Mr. Kirk being struck by the bullet that pierced his neck, had not recorded the shooting and would not be a witness in the criminal case.
“Is the child a witness to the circumstances?” Ryan McBride, the general crimes division chief in the Utah County attorney’s office, told the court. “Sure, but so are 3,000 others.”
The defense accused prosecutors of being cavalier about the potential for a perceived conflict and said the county attorney should have “walled off” Mr. Grunander because his daughter was present at the scene. The defense pointed out that the county attorney had not consulted with Utah’s attorney general or outside legal experts before deciding to keep Mr. Grunander on the case.
Defense lawyers also suggested that the daughter’s presence at the shooting could have factored into the prosecution’s decision to seek the death penalty against Mr. Robinson. Prosecutors dismissed that suggestion as “laughable.”
Mr. Grunander, who has been a prosecutor with the Utah County attorney’s office for nearly 22 years, said he knew his daughter had been planning to see Mr. Kirk speak. She was a fan of Mr. Kirk’s videos and had been excited to see him in person.
Then, at 12:25 p.m. on Sept. 10, his daughter sent him a text saying, “SOMEONE GOT SHOT,” later specifying that it was Mr. Kirk.
They briefly spoke on the phone a few minutes later. Mr. Grunander asked his daughter what she had heard, and she responded that she had heard a shot and that the crowd had begun screaming and running.
“I was startled,” Mr. Grunander testified on Tuesday. “I was concerned for her well-being.”
In the minutes after the shooting, as people in Mr. Grunander’s family group chat asked what was happening, Mr. Grunander told them, “I’m getting live information but I can’t share it now.”
Mr. Grunander said he had made the hourlong drive from his conference in Layton, Utah, to a command center in Orem where law-enforcement officials were frantically trying to understand what had happened and were working to identify Mr. Kirk’s killer.
Mr. Robinson would not be arrested until about 30 hours after the shooting, when he went with a family member to turn himself in to a local sheriff in his hometown, St. George, in southern Utah.
When Mr. Grunander got to the crime scene, he testified, he spotted his daughter’s dark blue bag with her laptop, lying where she had abandoned it. He said she had been about 85 feet from where Mr. Kirk had been struck.
Mr. Grunander’s daughter also testified on Tuesday, but Judge Graf ordered that her testimony not be broadcast on the livestream carrying the hearing. The Salt Lake Tribune, which was in the courtroom in Provo, reported that she said she had recorded a video of Mr. Kirk taking the stage but had put down her phone shortly before he was shot and had not seen his death.
Legal experts said the defense’s effort to have the Utah County attorney’s office removed from the case was unlikely to succeed.
“It was a public event with many other eyewitnesses,” said Teneille Brown, a law professor at the University of Utah. “It would be a much closer call if this kid had eyewitness testimony that would have been instrumental.”
Ms. Brown said the defense might have raised the issue as a delay tactic, or to preserve an argument for an appeal. The hearing was just one of several legal battles — over cameras in the courtroom, whether hearings should be public and other issues — that have come with nearly every step in the murder case against Mr. Robinson.
Mr. Grunander said his daughter had not missed work or needed therapy after the shooting. She felt sad for Mr. Kirk’s family, Mr. Grunander said, but “she seems to be doing fine.”
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.
The post Tyler Robinson’s Lawyers Press to Remove Prosecutors From Kirk Murder Case appeared first on New York Times.
